Word: japlish
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Some of the audience had to be tethered to their third-mezzanine front-row seats, such was the excitement for the opening of "Pokemon Live." The stage show adaptation of the kiddie-cult Pokemon (Japlish for "Pocket Monsters") phenomenon has officially begun its year-long national tour at New York's Radio City Music Hall. Flying completely under critics' radar, and presented with zero irony, "Pokemon Live" reveals itself as the 21st century's version of "The Magic Flute...
...little easier. We think it only natural to ask for hors d'oeuvres from a maitre d' -- as natural, perhaps, as discussing Realpolitik and the Zeitgeist with a Hamburger. And as English has become a kind of lingua franca, all of us are fluent in Franglais and in Japlish. It really is possible for an un-self-made man, arriving in Paris, to ask a mademoiselle for a rendezvous and then take her for le fast food and le dancing and even, perhaps, le parking. But later she may call him un jerk, and he may get upset...
Foreign languages do not simply acquire American terms, of course, but adapt and rework them in a sort of hybridization variously known as Franglais, Spanglish or Japlish. The Germans, who have traditionally enjoyed concocting exotic combinations like Satisfaktionsfahigkei t (the state of being socially eligible to fight a duel), now add English to German as though creating a polyglot strudel. Powerstimmung, for example, means a great mood, which can make a German ganz high or even ausgeflippt...
Perhaps one of the most indicative-and amusing-effects of American influence has been the infiltration of American English into other languages. Japanese sometimes sounds like Japlish: masukomi for mass communications, terebi for TV, demo for demonstration and the inevitable baseballisms pray bollu, storiku and hitto. Franglais permits a Frenchman to do le planning et research on le manpowerisation of a complexe industrielle before taking off for le weekend in le country. German now is splattered with such terms as discount house, shopping center, ready to wear and cash and carry. And the latest expression in Frankfurt ad agencies...
...account executives spare no effort to prove it. Each summer, when Japanese traditionally send each other greetings, teams of Dentsu men climb to the top of sacred Mount Fuji to post their seasonal cards to major clients. Ads aimed at Westerners living in Japan are written in "Japlish"-a stilted Japanese version of English. A recent Dentsu house ad boasted that the agency's ads reach an audience of 90 million "herdsmen, hoteliers, housewives, hostesses, heavyweights, hepcats, hipsters, and simply hordes of others...